Allison Whitten, Regen Melbourne's Director of Research, joined our team on our latest Impact Safari to Bhutan.
Did you know that there are no billboards in Bhutan and nearly every retail business is a small, local enterprise? Recently returned from a trip to the country famous for pioneering Gross National Happiness, Director of Research Alison Whitten shares lessons and insights from the road.
Landing at the international airport in Bhutan is not for the faint-of-heart. The plane weaves between the peaks of the Himalayas as it descends towards the Paro Valley, as if feeling its way through a narrow ravine.
At first, you can only catch glimpses of the mountains through the mist, but then the pine-covered slopes appear, startlingly close, nearly scraping the tips of the plane’s wings. And soon after that, large, white houses that seem frozen in time begin to speckle the mountains, near enough to the aeroplane’s windows that you can almost see into their front rooms.
A mere 2.5 seconds before landing the pilot aligns to the runway (as we learned afterwards, thankfully), landing smoothly to welcome passengers to the most ornate airport you’ve ever seen. It’s surreal, but it’s a fitting way to arrive in this beautiful and remote mountainous kingdom that was largely sheltered from the rest of the world until the 1970s.
I visited Bhutan in April as part of the Small Giants Impact Safari exploring Gross National Happiness (GNH). The GNH framework is of particular and obvious interest to me based on my oversight of Regen Melbourne’s City Portrait in Greater Melbourne. I entered into the trip with a big appetite to learn more about what has enabled an entire country to orient its policymaking around wellbeing, and what this could teach us back in Australia.
The trip was much more than an intellectual exploration, however. Impact Safaris are described as “a cross between a study tour and leadership experience” where “you can expect to be engaged through your head, heart and hands.” This is a tall order for a 10-day experience, but it was all true – and is actually insufficient to capture what I felt and took away from my short stay in Bhutan.
